Madad: Monitoring Movement
Films, photographs and diagrams. The Free Atelier, Kuwait (2012)
My father, Abdullah Al-Ghunaim, is a geomorphologist who studied land names and formations of the Arab region. In January 2010, we went together on a road trip around the Arabian Peninsula. My father’s intention is to show me how the colour of land changes from one area to another across the peninsula. I kept a travelogue and documented the trip using a video, analogue and digital cameras.
We were six people traveling by car at a speed of 100 to 120 kilometer per hour. My father’s commentary, my grandmother’s memories and songs from the radio were all contained in a mobile room across the landscape. And through that vastness, a cut suddenly happens: a camel giving birth, two kids racing or a mountain that is also an affectionate woman. Inside a car and on a street, we are only permitted to see that particular landscape, in that specific order and at that mentioned speed. The cuts were the protagonists, they control our conversations and our attention. Without these cuts we would’ve been absorbed in our elders’ memories and swallowed by Najd’s belly.
